Guts
by Grabbag Lapidary
Summary: A brief Christmas present although nothing about it is Christmasy! Set at the climax of the team's resuce of Ziva ... just how DID Gibbs get down that mountain so fast?


**A/n :** This is a Christmas present for Dread Lady Freya, written in 2010 as part of a gift exchange.

I had no idea at all what to get for Freya; my intent was to write gifts which reflected something of their work and something of mine. But Freya has so little published – a single Lord of the Rings story – I didn't know where to start. I wondered and considered, unsure what to do.

And then I saw an NCIS video and was reminded of the climax of the season 7 premiere – where Gibbs shoots Saleem in the head from about a mile and a half, but (more importantly) makes it down a mountain and across the desert in NO MORE THAN TWENTY SECONDS!

Seriously, time it.

So, based on the idea Freya would like hunky guys doing awesome stuff, and I'd been wanting to write this story for a while, she got something unrelated to her, but which was most definitely "from me".

Merry Christmas!

**Guts**

There is an old joke, among snipers. _What do you feel when you shoot an enemy who never knew you were there and had no idea you were watching him and wasn't aware he was going to die?_

The answer, of course, is _recoil_.

Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, NCIS, USMC (ret) felt the kick on his shoulder as he breathed out, waiting the calm seconds for the bullet to travel through the thin, arid air over the Somalian desert. Through his scope, he saw the filthy glass of the tiny window shatter and – just beyond it – the head of the terrorist Saleem explode into red mist.

He settled his throat more comfortably into the microphone. "Go," he ordered.

Far away, around the terrorist camp, the desert erupted into movement as Marines concealed beneath thin skins of tarpaulin and sand leaped up, some of them close enough to patrolling Somalian Muslims to grab them and slit their throats with well-honed KA-BARs. Others rose merely into a crouch and snapped M16s to shoulders, precision three-round bursts securing the immediate area.

The spotter lowered his field glasses. "Good shooting, Gunny," said the Corporal. "It's down to Agent DiNozzo to get the package out, right?"

Gibbs barely glanced at him. "Cover for me," he said, rolling to his feet.

"Gunny?" asked the Corporal, fumbling to fall into a sniping position and bring his rifle to bear.

"Rule Fifteen," said Gibbs, and sprinted down the hill towards the waiting motorcycle.

It was Hell on his knees – he was, by any stretch of the imagination, no longer a young man. The pain was manageable – the trick was to not mind that it hurt and to concentrate on not falling. Shocks to his knees would just hurt, but a tumble would be fatal.

He reached the bike in seconds, vaulting on the back and twisting the ignition. The roads were bad – packed dirt and sand, but the bike had good fat studded tires and got decent traction. He shipped the rifle on his back and raced around the outcropping of rock, screaming at dangerous speeds towards the terrorist camp.

His head told him the Marines would be able to handle anything in the camp – the Marines and his team, of course. McGee had looked pretty beat up, but he was certainly capable of cutting DiNozzo free and Gibbs had to admit the two of them on their feet (even drugged and wounded) were likely a match for a dozen or more terrorists. The class-clown and the geek were more than scrappy enough when they needed to be.

Heck, Tony had killed a Mossad agent in a straight-up brawl. That had to be tough enough.

His head told him there was no point in him racing towards the camp, but his gut told him something else. There was something he couldn't do from the hill, something he needed to be closer to do. He, a sniper, needed to be closer to do?

He'd learned not to question his gut. It had saved his life in deserts and jungles and other terrain a dozen times. "Gutsy Gibbs" they'd called him in Grenada. Lieutenant Kiley had come to rely on his gut in Desert Storm – that relationship hadn't ended well.

He was approaching the terrorist camp, coming up on it at a high rate of knots. There were figures in front of him, not in Marine desert DPM, but scraggy cloth rags wound around and around – the unofficial uniform of jihadi fighters from North Africa to Afghanistan. He snapped his hand to his hip – he wasn't carrying the Sig Sauer he'd got used to over his years in NCIS; he was back in his Marine uniform, gillie suit snapping in the breeze – and brought the M9 up in a single smooth motion, firing as he did so. The Somalians tumbled backwards, the AK-47s in their hands stammering even as they fell to the ground in a haze of their own blood.

There were too many for him to kill with a single magazine – the gun ran dry and he tossed it to the ground as Russian-made bullets tore the tire from the bike's front wheel and lead whined and hissed around him, tearing through the amorphous shape of his sniper suit. He tucked himself into a ball and rolled, hitting the desert floor as the bike tumbled and crashed, throwing up a great cloud of dust. He rose to his feet, his hip and knees screaming at him, spitting sand and grit, his KA-BAR drawn and gleaming in his fist.

He was a hundred yards from the doorway his gut said he needed to get to. The barrel of a Kalashnikov wavered towards him, a young, terrified man on the other end. He grabbed the barrel, drove it backwards hard and the plywood stock crushed the terrorist's neck. He slashed with the KA-BAR, another Somalian went down with his femoral artery opened from groin to knee. One of them grabbed him by the throat, trying to strangle him. He broke his nose and his grip with a crushing headbutt and buried the blade in the soft triangle of skin behind the collar bone of another.

His foes fell to the ground, dead, dying or unconscious. He let go of the knife and unshipped the rifle, checking it as he ran.

He sprinted to the doorway, running down a corridor and skidding to a halt in front of a window made of thick glass blocks. The sun was behind him, and he hoped the glass was thick and dirty enough to stop anyone from taking a shot at him from outside. He looked down the corridor.

There was a single Somalian, dressed in dirty while robes, with a sub machine gun in his hands. He held the gun at his hip and Gibbs could see his muscles begin to tighten.

Gibbs knew what he could see over the sights of that weapon – the daughter of the director of the Mossad, a basketball jock, and a Navy brat.

His gut had been right. Always was. He brought his rifle up and squeezed the trigger.

The Somali crashed sideways, slamming against the wall and collapsing to the floor, dead before he hit. Gibbs allowed himself a very small smile.

The team – _his_ team, the NCIS Major Case Response Team, DiNozzo, McGee and Ziva – limped around the corner, the woman supported by the men and giving them enough strength to do it. They looked up at him.

"Let's go home," he said.


End file.
